That GUI must have been mighty impressive in 1984. A few years ago windows XP's GUI looked ancient compared to Mac OS 10.4 but how must this first Macintosh have looked like next to a machine with MS DOS? This was probably as "magical" back then as Apple claims the iPad to be these days.
My Father bought me this 128K Mac in 1984 for $2495, about $2700 with tax... It was state of the art, in my mind... I burned up MacPaint, drawing 100s of little pictures, and even making a little bit of money with it... A VERY little bit... Then I started getting all the INSERT THIS DISK, then THAT DISK, then THIS DISK messages, back and forth, swapping disks all the time, 8 consecutive swaps in a row most of the time... WHAT A NIGHTMARE... Couldn't afford an external floppy at $495... The ImageWriter dot-matrix printer was $495, and would keep anybody at the other end of the house awake... It was SUPER loud... Black & White screen, when all my PC buddies had 16 colors... Couldn't upgrade the machine, as everything was soldered to the board... The whole experience was just a complete mistake from day 1, looking back now... Absolute piece of junk from the mind of Steve Jobs, and that's the way he wanted it... Absolute piece of shit with his mind set on ripping off as many people as he could...
As a young kid, had a IBM 286 upstairs (my parents'), and a 1987 b/w Mac downstairs (my grandma's). King's Quest upstairs, Crystal Quest downstairs. Parents wouldn't get me a Nintendo until the 90s, but was spoiled nonetheless.
@SteveBenway It's so worth it grab one at a nice price! For collectors it's one of those very respectable machines to own. It's just that it will likely sit there looking pretty and little else, but hey. That's fine with me.
I never understood why so many of these older computers didn't have the OS stored in ROM. It's not like you had to worry about updating your OS from the internet.
Well, I guess I didn't think of that, I'm used to buying a 4 gig stick of memory for 30 bucks:) Still, with how expensive Macs are/were, you would expect better than having to worry about buying an extra drive or doing all of that disk swapping. Was the ROM more or less expensive than the extra drive?
Audiomancer These early Macintosh computers were almost impossible to use without a second diskette drive to store your system files. Without that 2nd drive you might be prompted 50 or 60 times to remove the program disk and insert the system disk as the computer loaded the program.. It was a pain in the ass.
+Audiomancer Actually a good portion of the Mac OS -was- stored in ROM. The System Software disk even has extra code to patch critical bugs in the ROM regarding things like clipboard handling. It's why emulating these things is such a pain despite Apple literally giving away old System disks on a dark corner of their website. They're useless without the ROM chip dumps. It's also why there were practically no (unauthorized) classic Mac clones, and why most emulators don't bother trying to provide compatible replacements, as the way the system software interacts with the ROM is ridiculously tightly coupled.
+Audiomancer Actually a good portion of the Mac OS -was- stored in ROM. The System Software disk even has extra code to patch critical bugs in the ROM regarding things like clipboard handling. It's why emulating these things is such a pain despite Apple literally giving away old System disks on a dark corner of their website. They're useless without the ROM chip dumps. It's also why there were practically no (unauthorized) classic Mac clones, and why most emulators don't bother trying to provide compatible replacements, as the way the system software interacts with the ROM is ridiculously tightly coupled.
The only thing that's really changed about your channel over the years is the quality, which has improved substantially. Other than that, the theme of your channel has remained pretty consistent. It's pretty difficult to find channels nowadays like this one.
My grandpa had the Macintosh Plus. Thanks for posting footage of Daleks. For some reason memories of that game popped in my head. So fun to see the footage here.
My Mac take: In the late 80's there were online dial-up services like CompuServe and GEnie. They had chat rooms. These were the balls pre internet. People wrote little programs to.automate their chat to run trivia games. I had an Amiga 500 which was uber powerful at the time. It had no chat programs. I used my Amiga 500 with an emulator (yes pre-1990's had emulators crazy) to install the Mac 128Ks OS, which had chat trivia games, on my Amiga so I could run a trivia game. On GEnie. It was awesome. When I wasn't playing Gemstone.
It took cues from the Xerox Star and improved it. The Xerox Mouse was clunky to use, It didn't let you have windows under windows and was overly expensive.
I feel in love a similar Macintosh (probably a Classic) in 1991 when I was in Kindergarten. I loved computer lab time more than anything. Then in 4th grade I went to newly built school with brand new Windows computers and never looked back lol
I had as my first computer the first Macintosh the 128k Mac. Back then your choices were to use the command line interface of IBM compatibles and an amber or green single color command line with dos prompt or this new Mac with the new graphical user interface in black and white, wow it was so awe inspiring! My Mac came with keyboard, mouse, and later an Imagewriter II dot matrix printer. With this machine, you could type a letter (to be placed in an envelope and mailed at the post office), and wait for a few minutes while the Imagewriter screeched out one line at a time with a back and forth of the print head. You literally sent your print job, then went for a cup of coffee while it printed. Boy did this thing beat using a typewriter! Imagine not having to worry about typos and having to use "white out" to correct the errors. I later upgraded my Mac to a "better than" Mac Plus equivalent with a third party "daughter card" called the MacRescue. This souped up board had to be manually soldered, pin by pin to the original Mac 128k logic board by attaching the upgrade board directly to the Motorola 68000 processors' socket. It had to be done by an electronics shop with the proper heat controlled soldering stations. After the upgrade was installed I now had double the storage capacity as the upgrade provided upgraded ROM's and an 800k floppy disk in place of the original 400k floppy drive, it also provided the new SCSI interface that would allow the attachment of all kinds of other peripherals. I later obtained an external 800k floppy to quadruple my storage and did I ever need it as those game manufacturers kept making the games so large that I'd have to do floppy swaps during game-play. The other great innovation of this particular upgrade board was the addition of SIMM sockets allowing for RAM expansion. My original Mac had 128K of soldered RAM, now I could add up to a whopping 6 Megabytes with one Megabyte SIMM's!! While the Mac OS version 6.08 allowed for only use of 4 megabytes, the other two megabytes of RAM could be used as a RAM disk onto which the operating system could be transferred so that it performed at the speed of RAM rather than at the limited speed of the floppy disk drives. So hot! Imagine screaming along at a fast 7Mhz. Later expansions included a SCSI single speed CDROM (no burning capability) for loading the ever increasing game sizes, two external SCSI hard disk drives (20 Mbytes and 40 Mbytes), as well as a scanner head that was put in place of the Imagewriters print ribbon head and which could scan one line at a time to produce an 8 greyscale image fed through the printers rollers. High technology, high tech indeed! LGR and the 8 Bit Guy have inspired me to restore my venerable first computer, which somehow has survived an arson fire, and these many years since 1984. The flyback transformer needs to be resoldered to the analog board and there may be a few other component failures, but I'll upload my results at some point.
I am a Mac lover, but I find it hard to believe that the very first of the breed launched in 1984 didn't even come with color graphics. A frikkin Commodore Vic 20 even had color graphics. And the Amiga which was announced just a year later would comfortably lay it to waste, with color graphics, better sound and a pre-emptive multitasking GUI from the outset.
Maybe it has something to do with conserving memory. Believe it or not, color actually does take memory. That's why if you chose a higher color setting in a 90s-era Windows operating system (95 or 98), you may have a lower screen resolution to conserve memory.
Sorry for the 2-years later reply... but just look at the Macintosh II, that thing basically cost twice as much as a Mac Plus because it had more RAM, mandatory hard drive, a faster processor, and a 8-bit graphic card + the cost of the RGB monitor. The GUI needs a lot of power. They could have done a colour Mac from 1984 but it would have cost a fortune, and they would have sold very very few.
It was meant to be a business machine, the Amiga was still mostly made out of discrete breadboards when the Mac was already on the market, and essentially it was a shrunken Lisa; it even uses the same screen mode from the monitor's point of view, just running a slower pixel clock to give a reduced horizontal resolution, and I think it might in fact format its discs the exact same way even though they're a different size. What it was competing against wasn't the multimedia dazzlement of the Amiga (which was pretty much designed as a games console that happened to have a keyboard and floppy drive bolted on, a mouse that could plug into one of the joyports, and discs that included a GUI), but the IBM PC and all the endless CPM clones that were around at the time - all with monochrome monitors, mostly green or amber on black, mostly textmode only, or using a somewhat wonky 640x200 (or cruder 320x200) graphics resolution, if indeed not 512x256 or 512x192 - as well as being an upgrade from their own Apple II (the best it could muster, on a monochrome display, being 560x192) and the Atari 8-bits (384x192 typical max). And depending who you believe it was also either partly aimed at taking the fight to the Atari ST, or the ST was intended to take the fight to the Mac, with its top screen mode also being a high-rez progressive monochrome on a special monitor... though Tramiel's boys somewhat got the jump on Apple by using a 72hz scan and 640x400 resolution that trounced not only the Mac in both dimensions but also the Lisa on sheer pixel count. IE colour wasn't seen as too important for business uses at the time; they were going after execs who wanted a "serious" computer to do word processing and spreadsheets and stuff on, but didn't have the desk space, the technical mindset or the sheer time and spare effort needed to install and then get to grips with a more common micro of the kind that existed before then. So, high rez mono display (gives finer detail but doesn't use any more memory than e.g. the 256x192 16-colour of an MSX, and basically the same as an NES would if its 256x224 was an 8-colour bitmap; colours other than black or white not really being too important for the uses to which it would be put), mostly black on white to make it seem more like paper instead of a machine, with a friendly and easy to use mouse-driven GUI (they didn't even include any cursors on the keyboard at first, or more than one control/alt type key, to encourage near-exclusive use of the mouse for everything other than actual text entry, and the single button made it universal for left and right handers), in as compact a box as they could manage to mean it could fit on even the smallest and most cluttered desk without monopolising it (whilst I rag on the screen rez, it was a good fit for the actual tube size; with just a minimal amount of border it equated to a true 72dpi, meaning font pixel height correlated directly to its point size, and WYSIWYG stuff was a breeze to program - and from typical desktop usage distance, with the computer pushed towards the back instead of the front of the desk, and the user not craning forwards, unlike the more modern close-range setup, 72dpi actually seems fairly refined even though it looks terrible if you *print* at that size). It was extremely well designed for the market they intended to capture... it's just a pity they didn't put a double sided drive and more memory on the motherboard from day one. Or indeed looked for slightly larger tubes of the same depth, so the box would be the same width as the keyboard and, together with the greater RAM provision, could then have supported a higher basic resolution... at least 512x384, if not 576x400, or indeed 640x400, even 640x480. But enough people bought it even so. After all, 512 is still *just* enough to provide 80-column text (at a sparing but still readable 6 pixels per column, as used on various other 80s machines) plus a scrollbar and window border...
My mom had one of these brand new with the printer. We had it all the way up until the year 2000, only because my teenage self begged my parents for an iBook g3 in Tangerine. I remember writing every book report, essays, and many other assignments on this old girl.
I ran across a 128k a few years ago at a thrift store for 20 dollars, but didn't bother to pick it up. I didn't realize that I was a collector of old computers even though I had accumulated a ton of them. I dismissed it as "Junk". I kick myself now about it! Great review man!
Good thing i found this review, i couldn't figure out how to power on and use my newly purchased Macintosh. Feels good to finally be upgrading from a Commodore PET to this. I can actually play games on this thing!
our school used to have like 20 of these piled up in storage for a bunch of years. it's a shame they eventually just trashed them. wouldve been a small gold mine.
I have to say, not one episode of your show has been anything but awesome and I'm pretty damn sure you're the best (and easily the most overlooked) reviewer on UA-cam. I also loved that right when I was thinking "hey, Evil Dead montage!" you totally threw in the "Groovy." Damn you make good stuff, keep it up!
My Grandpa had about 5 or 6 macs sitting on a shelf in the basement of the house. Once my grandparents moved out he got rid of half of them and the other half were given to his friends (I think). We still have two left. A mac plus 1mb and a Color Classic (Not exactly sure if we still have the Color Classic to be honest).
I remember that the very first computer i ever used was one of these but it wasn't this model. It was a Mac LC 1 model that had a black and white monitor but also had its own hard drive. I remember playing games like "Dark Castle", "Glider", "Glypha", "Hangman" and "Continuum" on it almost everyday. A couple of years later, my father bought a Mac LC 2 which had a color monitor and an external CD drive. I used it to play games such as "Thinking Things 2", "Maelstrom", "Bolo", "Widget's Workshop", "Lemmings", "Spectre", "The Incredible Machine", "Marathon" and "Marathon 2: Durandal". Man...those sure were some fun times. I wish i could go back to the past so that i could live them again.
Holy CRAP. BANZAI! I remember that came from 7th grade. Our computer lab had like 20 brand spanking new Macintosh computers and in order to help supplement the costs, they would allow students to pay money after school for all you can eat gaming, and the game to play.....was Banzai.
Awesome review as usual Clint! That first ever Macintosh Desktop - whew! Anyway, doing back viewing of classic LGR videos! Looking forward to the next one! More power and God bless from the Philippines!
Great video! I recommend any that wants to play around with classic all in one Macs look for the SE, or SE30. They probably have a hard drive, can take modern floppy drives (1.4 meg), and ADB mice and keyboards are easy to find.
You're absolutely right on the disk swapping. A friend of mine got one of these in 1984 and I could barely stand to use it, even with MacWrite and MacPaint. Macs in general weren't very useful or popular until the LaserWriter came out. Then they started the Desktop Publishing boom and became infinitely more useful. But the 128K Mac was more of a technology demonstrator than a computer that you could do useful work on. Incidentally, the original Mac printer was a dot matrix unit that accurately reproduced what was on screen, including fonts and graphics, but at terribly slow speed and with terrible resolution.
This was my first ever encounter with a computer (sometimes brought home from work by my dad). I was 6 years old and instantly loved it. I played Dark Castle, Pyramid of Ra, Shuffle Puck, and Shadow gate from what I can remember. I still think its amazing how beautifull they made Dark Castle look, even though it was black and white on a tiny screen. It was a scary game for a six year old though, and pretty hard :) good times good times
The 128K Mac was considered useless by some back in 1986. In the fall of 1986 while in high school I took a class on graphic arts. Along with industrial paper cutters, photo-lithography, light tables and other cool publishing stuff was a Macintosh. I think it was a Mac Plus. Up, stacked up on to of a table, in the corner still in its original box was an un-used 128K Mac. I asked the teacher about it at one point, and he said it was the first Mac, but it wasn't too useful, so it sat un-used So these things were sometimes abandoned after just 2 years. The school might not have been too happy about it... the thing $2500 new.
So I felt kind of afraid of the video feeling extremely old, but aside from video quality it's the same exact voice doing the same exact stuff. I got to say this is the least corrupt UA-cam channel to this day.
I don't think I ever had one of those mac computers mostly cause I was born in 87. I think I used one in school though. But I pretty much started getting into computers when windows 95 came out.
+TheCrimsonDuelist Same here. Pretty much all my experience with Apple is through early grade school and a little later in high school. And that time I bought an ipod.
I used a Macintosh Classic II with Glider (this game's name was extremly hard to find), a tetris clone, a golf game and others as a 5-6 year old kid. I have lots of great memories about it (also it was in about 2003)
today we still use command line in linux and even online with building a web site and such. the early all in one macs had a flaw where the analog board power supplies would fail and would need to be replaced.
If you go to the wayback machine you can see the root URL from the end of the video as it looked in Feb 2011 (the closest date I could find to when this video was published). I thought it would be is family's site - like his last name is Basinger, and LGR was his personal site on that domain. Instead its just a few links to some of his stuff.
@phreakindee I've been reading "West of Eden" which was published in 1989 and chronicles the inner workings of Apple up to that point. I was in elementary school at that time in history so the only computer mentioned in the book that I've actually used is the Apple II. Videos like yours help me get a visual on the other computers written about in the book. So thanks again.
(Turns into typical mac user) - Curse you Steve Jobbs! I like this system, in some respects it was very impressive for its time, great review as well, it's always cool to wake up and see a new vid from you in my subscriptions box.
Ahh, Crystal Quest, so many hours of joy, the later versions have a rather …”unique” sound when you exit the gate at the end of each level… ;) Thanks for the memory!
I remember the first proper computer in our house was a mac classic. We didn't own it (mum had borrowed it from work) but it looked almost identical. It wasn't the same model though, because I don't recall needing to do constant disk swaps, and in fact, I'm fairly sure it had a hard drive, and that I hardly ever put a disk in the thing. Not too much after that, we ended up with a 286 instead, which we actually did own. Also some atari 800's...
The C64 had GEOS, which worked pretty well. The real machine that blew the Mac out of the water was the Amiga, it had full cooperative multitasking before the Mac did.
despite the small screen, i had typesetting coworkers who actually used Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Pagemaker on a Mac Plus. I did the same on an SE/30 for a magazine. Large screens were rare in those days and we just got used to it.
i used that computer in high school. they replace all of them in the computer lab with the new i mac when it came out. i remember i use to play the first Sim City on that one when i was board. and loading the 2 floppy drives. Now students carry a USB flash drive.
You did quite nicely on this one Clint with what the prices are like now. Still I know as a fellow lover of old machines you likely never would. That SCSI upgrade card is likely worth a small fortune all on its own. I totally want that for mine.
@@walktroughman1952 No, never did get that SCSI interface. I have another of these machines but no real plans to upgrade it yet, this one needs to be troubleshot and I need a keyboard for it. 11 years! Yeah it has been a while.
I played so many shareware games on a MacPlus, you'd be surprised how late you could still dial into AOL on that thing. I'd love to see more B&W Mac game reviews.
They are crazy expensive now. I bought mine 512k for 20 euro. It came with all accessories and 5 disks like the system is and macinotsh write, but it hasn’t run in over 25 years and it probably never will.still think it’s cool as furniture.
I bought a Mac Plus about 1988 and had carrying bag for it. Had it stored in a closet since about 1990. A few months ago I got it out of the closet plugged in the external floppy drive and power cord and powered it up and... it booted up. After a few hours of fooling with it I put it back in the closet. If I'm around 20 years from now I might take it out again.
I like to see how the "soul" of this channel is still the same after so many years. Thank you for your dedication sir :)
You can tell a lot from these early videos, that he knew what he wanted to do, he just had to find his feet.
Amen
@@horseradishpower9947 I'm sure Clint knows where his feet are. If he didn't he'd be in a wheelchair.
Mid fursona
This was the 1st lgr video I had watched on a day off from work. 8 years later, still watching. Do not stop what you are doing Clint!
Are you still watching now?
I almost can't believe hipster and banksy jokes have been around so long.
Haha, they were played-out even in 2010 :P
Years later those jokes and the channel itself have aged well XD
Well, I reckon they will be around for a few more years yet...
I just realised when he mentioned buying a bicycle
The original name Steve jobs wanted to call the Macintosh was bicycle
Man, I wish Vintage computers had not gone up in price so much in the past 6 years. You can't find a working Macintosh 128K for under $1000 today.
It is pretty wild how high in value some computers have gotten!
seriously I got a vic 20 for 20$
Hipsters ruin everything.
Which really sucks when you've wanted some of these machines for that long, but were under-age at the time and your parents refused to allow it...
Really?!? I have to visit my uncle then... If I'm not mistaken he has something like this, even if it could be an SE and not a 128k...
That GUI must have been mighty impressive in 1984.
A few years ago windows XP's GUI looked ancient compared to Mac OS 10.4 but how must this first Macintosh have looked like next to a machine with MS DOS?
This was probably as "magical" back then as Apple claims the iPad to be these days.
My Father bought me this 128K Mac in 1984 for $2495, about $2700 with tax... It was state of the art, in my mind... I burned up MacPaint, drawing 100s of little pictures, and even making a little bit of money with it... A VERY little bit... Then I started getting all the INSERT THIS DISK, then THAT DISK, then THIS DISK messages, back and forth, swapping disks all the time, 8 consecutive swaps in a row most of the time... WHAT A NIGHTMARE... Couldn't afford an external floppy at $495... The ImageWriter dot-matrix printer was $495, and would keep anybody at the other end of the house awake... It was SUPER loud... Black & White screen, when all my PC buddies had 16 colors... Couldn't upgrade the machine, as everything was soldered to the board... The whole experience was just a complete mistake from day 1, looking back now... Absolute piece of junk from the mind of Steve Jobs, and that's the way he wanted it... Absolute piece of shit with his mind set on ripping off as many people as he could...
What a throwback! I used to work on that back in the day in the print industry.
As a young kid, had a IBM 286 upstairs (my parents'), and a 1987 b/w Mac downstairs (my grandma's). King's Quest upstairs, Crystal Quest downstairs. Parents wouldn't get me a Nintendo until the 90s, but was spoiled nonetheless.
@SteveBenway It's so worth it grab one at a nice price! For collectors it's one of those very respectable machines to own. It's just that it will likely sit there looking pretty and little else, but hey. That's fine with me.
I never understood why so many of these older computers didn't have the OS stored in ROM. It's not like you had to worry about updating your OS from the internet.
Audiomancer ROM chips were crazy expensive, mainly. Some systems did, but many did not due to the cost and manufacturing/chip supply issues.
Well, I guess I didn't think of that, I'm used to buying a 4 gig stick of memory for 30 bucks:) Still, with how expensive Macs are/were, you would expect better than having to worry about buying an extra drive or doing all of that disk swapping. Was the ROM more or less expensive than the extra drive?
Audiomancer These early Macintosh computers were almost impossible to use without a second diskette drive to store your system files. Without that 2nd drive you might be prompted 50 or 60 times to remove the program disk and insert the system disk as the computer loaded the program.. It was a pain in the ass.
+Audiomancer Actually a good portion of the Mac OS -was- stored in ROM. The System Software disk even has extra code to patch critical bugs in the ROM regarding things like clipboard handling.
It's why emulating these things is such a pain despite Apple literally giving away old System disks on a dark corner of their website. They're useless without the ROM chip dumps. It's also why there were practically no (unauthorized) classic Mac clones, and why most emulators don't bother trying to provide compatible replacements, as the way the system software interacts with the ROM is ridiculously tightly coupled.
+Audiomancer Actually a good portion of the Mac OS -was- stored in ROM. The System Software disk even has extra code to patch critical bugs in the ROM regarding things like clipboard handling.
It's why emulating these things is such a pain despite Apple literally giving away old System disks on a dark corner of their website. They're useless without the ROM chip dumps. It's also why there were practically no (unauthorized) classic Mac clones, and why most emulators don't bother trying to provide compatible replacements, as the way the system software interacts with the ROM is ridiculously tightly coupled.
Congrats on becoming a partner. Took them long enough lmao! I went through the same thing.
IT'S YOU
SKIBBITY BOP MM DA DA
@TheAtariJunkie Thanks. It's the little details that count!
6 years later and this is still an amazingly humorous video to watch. Those darn hipsters, ruining everything...
The only thing that's really changed about your channel over the years is the quality, which has improved substantially. Other than that, the theme of your channel has remained pretty consistent. It's pretty difficult to find channels nowadays like this one.
My grandpa had the Macintosh Plus. Thanks for posting footage of Daleks. For some reason memories of that game popped in my head. So fun to see the footage here.
My Mac take:
In the late 80's there were online dial-up services like CompuServe and GEnie. They had chat rooms.
These were the balls pre internet. People wrote little programs to.automate their chat to run trivia games.
I had an Amiga 500 which was uber powerful at the time. It had no chat programs.
I used my Amiga 500 with an emulator (yes pre-1990's had emulators crazy) to install the Mac 128Ks OS, which had chat trivia games, on my Amiga so I could run a trivia game. On GEnie.
It was awesome. When I wasn't playing Gemstone.
I look forward to these reviews every Friday night when I get off work for the week. Awesome as always, man
'Taking cues from the Xerox Star' is very generous. LOL.
It took cues from the Xerox Star and improved it. The Xerox Mouse was clunky to use, It didn't let you have windows under windows and was overly expensive.
It’s been a few years since this video was posted, but it sure was a lovely trip down memory lane… Clint hasn’t aged a day 😁
6:00
Frankly not a bad drawing..
Just FYI, the original mac had full 8-bit, 22Khz sound reproduction. It just took software a while to use it.
Oh yes,the computer that got Steve Jobs fired.
I feel in love a similar Macintosh (probably a Classic) in 1991 when I was in Kindergarten. I loved computer lab time more than anything. Then in 4th grade I went to newly built school with brand new Windows computers and never looked back lol
I had as my first computer the first Macintosh the 128k Mac. Back then your choices were to use the command line interface of IBM compatibles and an amber or green single color command line with dos prompt or this new Mac with the new graphical user interface in black and white, wow it was so awe inspiring! My Mac came with keyboard, mouse, and later an Imagewriter II dot matrix printer. With this machine, you could type a letter (to be placed in an envelope and mailed at the post office), and wait for a few minutes while the Imagewriter screeched out one line at a time with a back and forth of the print head. You literally sent your print job, then went for a cup of coffee while it printed. Boy did this thing beat using a typewriter! Imagine not having to worry about typos and having to use "white out" to correct the errors. I later upgraded my Mac to a "better than" Mac Plus equivalent with a third party "daughter card" called the MacRescue. This souped up board had to be manually soldered, pin by pin to the original Mac 128k logic board by attaching the upgrade board directly to the Motorola 68000 processors' socket. It had to be done by an electronics shop with the proper heat controlled soldering stations. After the upgrade was installed I now had double the storage capacity as the upgrade provided upgraded ROM's and an 800k floppy disk in place of the original 400k floppy drive, it also provided the new SCSI interface that would allow the attachment of all kinds of other peripherals. I later obtained an external 800k floppy to quadruple my storage and did I ever need it as those game manufacturers kept making the games so large that I'd have to do floppy swaps during game-play. The other great innovation of this particular upgrade board was the addition of SIMM sockets allowing for RAM expansion. My original Mac had 128K of soldered RAM, now I could add up to a whopping 6 Megabytes with one Megabyte SIMM's!! While the Mac OS version 6.08 allowed for only use of 4 megabytes, the other two megabytes of RAM could be used as a RAM disk onto which the operating system could be transferred so that it performed at the speed of RAM rather than at the limited speed of the floppy disk drives. So hot! Imagine screaming along at a fast 7Mhz. Later expansions included a SCSI single speed CDROM (no burning capability) for loading the ever increasing game sizes, two external SCSI hard disk drives (20 Mbytes and 40 Mbytes), as well as a scanner head that was put in place of the Imagewriters print ribbon head and which could scan one line at a time to produce an 8 greyscale image fed through the printers rollers. High technology, high tech indeed! LGR and the 8 Bit Guy have inspired me to restore my venerable first computer, which somehow has survived an arson fire, and these many years since 1984. The flyback transformer needs to be resoldered to the analog board and there may be a few other component failures, but I'll upload my results at some point.
I am a Mac lover, but I find it hard to believe that the very first of the breed launched in 1984 didn't even come with color graphics. A frikkin Commodore Vic 20 even had color graphics. And the Amiga which was announced just a year later would comfortably lay it to waste, with color graphics, better sound and a pre-emptive multitasking GUI from the outset.
but the plus was that it had a screen built in and the GUI of course
Maybe it has something to do with conserving memory. Believe it or not, color actually does take memory. That's why if you chose a higher color setting in a 90s-era Windows operating system (95 or 98), you may have a lower screen resolution to conserve memory.
Sorry for the 2-years later reply... but just look at the Macintosh II, that thing basically cost twice as much as a Mac Plus because it had more RAM, mandatory hard drive, a faster processor, and a 8-bit graphic card + the cost of the RGB monitor. The GUI needs a lot of power.
They could have done a colour Mac from 1984 but it would have cost a fortune, and they would have sold very very few.
It was meant to be a business machine, the Amiga was still mostly made out of discrete breadboards when the Mac was already on the market, and essentially it was a shrunken Lisa; it even uses the same screen mode from the monitor's point of view, just running a slower pixel clock to give a reduced horizontal resolution, and I think it might in fact format its discs the exact same way even though they're a different size.
What it was competing against wasn't the multimedia dazzlement of the Amiga (which was pretty much designed as a games console that happened to have a keyboard and floppy drive bolted on, a mouse that could plug into one of the joyports, and discs that included a GUI), but the IBM PC and all the endless CPM clones that were around at the time - all with monochrome monitors, mostly green or amber on black, mostly textmode only, or using a somewhat wonky 640x200 (or cruder 320x200) graphics resolution, if indeed not 512x256 or 512x192 - as well as being an upgrade from their own Apple II (the best it could muster, on a monochrome display, being 560x192) and the Atari 8-bits (384x192 typical max). And depending who you believe it was also either partly aimed at taking the fight to the Atari ST, or the ST was intended to take the fight to the Mac, with its top screen mode also being a high-rez progressive monochrome on a special monitor... though Tramiel's boys somewhat got the jump on Apple by using a 72hz scan and 640x400 resolution that trounced not only the Mac in both dimensions but also the Lisa on sheer pixel count.
IE colour wasn't seen as too important for business uses at the time; they were going after execs who wanted a "serious" computer to do word processing and spreadsheets and stuff on, but didn't have the desk space, the technical mindset or the sheer time and spare effort needed to install and then get to grips with a more common micro of the kind that existed before then. So, high rez mono display (gives finer detail but doesn't use any more memory than e.g. the 256x192 16-colour of an MSX, and basically the same as an NES would if its 256x224 was an 8-colour bitmap; colours other than black or white not really being too important for the uses to which it would be put), mostly black on white to make it seem more like paper instead of a machine, with a friendly and easy to use mouse-driven GUI (they didn't even include any cursors on the keyboard at first, or more than one control/alt type key, to encourage near-exclusive use of the mouse for everything other than actual text entry, and the single button made it universal for left and right handers), in as compact a box as they could manage to mean it could fit on even the smallest and most cluttered desk without monopolising it (whilst I rag on the screen rez, it was a good fit for the actual tube size; with just a minimal amount of border it equated to a true 72dpi, meaning font pixel height correlated directly to its point size, and WYSIWYG stuff was a breeze to program - and from typical desktop usage distance, with the computer pushed towards the back instead of the front of the desk, and the user not craning forwards, unlike the more modern close-range setup, 72dpi actually seems fairly refined even though it looks terrible if you *print* at that size).
It was extremely well designed for the market they intended to capture... it's just a pity they didn't put a double sided drive and more memory on the motherboard from day one. Or indeed looked for slightly larger tubes of the same depth, so the box would be the same width as the keyboard and, together with the greater RAM provision, could then have supported a higher basic resolution... at least 512x384, if not 576x400, or indeed 640x400, even 640x480. But enough people bought it even so. After all, 512 is still *just* enough to provide 80-column text (at a sparing but still readable 6 pixels per column, as used on various other 80s machines) plus a scrollbar and window border...
These were business machines so there was no reason for color, just like the ibm line
8:18 probably my favourite lgr quote
I literally laughed out loud seeing that URL at the end. You've come a long way, LGR!
My mom had one of these brand new with the printer. We had it all the way up until the year 2000, only because my teenage self begged my parents for an iBook g3 in Tangerine. I remember writing every book report, essays, and many other assignments on this old girl.
I ran across a 128k a few years ago at a thrift store for 20 dollars, but didn't bother to pick it up. I didn't realize that I was a collector of old computers even though I had accumulated a ton of them. I dismissed it as "Junk". I kick myself now about it! Great review man!
@6:08 I didn't know LGR was a AVGN cosplayer in his younger days!
Lazy Game Reviews --- Your reviews are very thorough while keeping a delicate balance of entertainment. Thank you!
Good thing i found this review, i couldn't figure out how to power on and use my newly purchased Macintosh. Feels good to finally be upgrading from a Commodore PET to this. I can actually play games on this thing!
our school used to have like 20 of these piled up in storage for a bunch of years. it's a shame they eventually just trashed them. wouldve been a small gold mine.
I have to say, not one episode of your show has been anything but awesome and I'm pretty damn sure you're the best (and easily the most overlooked) reviewer on UA-cam. I also loved that right when I was thinking "hey, Evil Dead montage!" you totally threw in the "Groovy." Damn you make good stuff, keep it up!
My Grandpa had about 5 or 6 macs sitting on a shelf in the basement of the house. Once my grandparents moved out he got rid of half of them and the other half were given to his friends (I think). We still have two left. A mac plus 1mb and a Color Classic (Not exactly sure if we still have the Color Classic to be honest).
Great review. I remember growing up with Macs of some kind (much later models I think...), and they were a lot of fun.
I remember that the very first computer i ever used was one of these but it wasn't this model.
It was a Mac LC 1 model that had a black and white monitor but also had its own hard drive.
I remember playing games like "Dark Castle", "Glider", "Glypha", "Hangman" and "Continuum" on it almost everyday.
A couple of years later, my father bought a Mac LC 2 which had a color monitor and an external CD drive. I used it to play games such as "Thinking Things 2", "Maelstrom", "Bolo", "Widget's Workshop", "Lemmings", "Spectre", "The Incredible Machine", "Marathon" and "Marathon 2: Durandal".
Man...those sure were some fun times. I wish i could go back to the past so that i could live them again.
6:12. Best moment in all of LGR history.
All hail the great Clint. I bow to you witg your superior computer knowledge^^
Holy CRAP. BANZAI! I remember that came from 7th grade. Our computer lab had like 20 brand spanking new Macintosh computers and in order to help supplement the costs, they would allow students to pay money after school for all you can eat gaming, and the game to play.....was Banzai.
We used to use those back in the 90s when I was in high school to do very basic programming. This brings back memories
Awesome review as usual Clint! That first ever Macintosh Desktop - whew! Anyway, doing back viewing of classic LGR videos! Looking forward to the next one! More power and God bless from the Philippines!
It's insane that their low-level computers are still being sold for $999 after all these years.
Great video! I recommend any that wants to play around with classic all in one Macs look for the SE, or SE30. They probably have a hard drive, can take modern floppy drives (1.4 meg), and ADB mice and keyboards are easy to find.
You're absolutely right on the disk swapping. A friend of mine got one of these in 1984 and I could barely stand to use it, even with MacWrite and MacPaint. Macs in general weren't very useful or popular until the LaserWriter came out. Then they started the Desktop Publishing boom and became infinitely more useful. But the 128K Mac was more of a technology demonstrator than a computer that you could do useful work on. Incidentally, the original Mac printer was a dot matrix unit that accurately reproduced what was on screen, including fonts and graphics, but at terribly slow speed and with terrible resolution.
4:13 "groovy"
goddammit you're awesome
“I don’t hate it I just think it’s useless” haha best line!
Ooh dropping acid and then using an ancient Macintosh. Thanks for the suggestion!
This was my first ever encounter with a computer (sometimes brought home from work by my dad). I was 6 years old and instantly loved it. I played Dark Castle, Pyramid of Ra, Shuffle Puck, and Shadow gate from what I can remember. I still think its amazing how beautifull they made Dark Castle look, even though it was black and white on a tiny screen. It was a scary game for a six year old though, and pretty hard :) good times good times
The 128K Mac was considered useless by some back in 1986. In the fall of 1986 while in high school I took a class on graphic arts. Along with industrial paper cutters, photo-lithography, light tables and other cool publishing stuff was a Macintosh. I think it was a Mac Plus.
Up, stacked up on to of a table, in the corner still in its original box was an un-used 128K Mac. I asked the teacher about it at one point, and he said it was the first Mac, but it wasn't too useful, so it sat un-used
So these things were sometimes abandoned after just 2 years. The school might not have been too happy about it... the thing $2500 new.
the one thing i absolutely do not miss from my elementary school days
Lol, love it as usual, great review, love the comedy input too :o)
Can we get a 4k60 remaster of the OG intro?
This video is 8 years old already! Where has the time gone?
man, it's actually hard to belive that Apple made new things and not the same thing over and over again
I almost choked on my food just now when he said he got it for 50 bucks. Then I see the vid is from 12 yrs ago. Aged so well
"Daleks"?
Like the "Doctor Who" Daleks?
That's pretty cool!
Yep, there's even a Sonic Screwdriver option with command key + S at the minut 7:09!
2:32 man, do I miss those retro gaming prices.
Love that Global Communication track throughout the video
Oh Crystal quest! My uncle had that on his LC2 back in the day. Loved that game as a kid :)
Love the reviews! Only thing is, i wish you would do more game reviews(not so much computers). Still awesome.
3:58 you should try running system seven. the requirements are two megabytes and a scsi hard drive.
So I felt kind of afraid of the video feeling extremely old, but aside from video quality it's the same exact voice doing the same exact stuff. I got to say this is the least corrupt UA-cam channel to this day.
I don't think I ever had one of those mac computers mostly cause I was born in 87. I think I used one in school though. But I pretty much started getting into computers when windows 95 came out.
+TheCrimsonDuelist Same here. Pretty much all my experience with Apple is through early grade school and a little later in high school. And that time I bought an ipod.
I used a Macintosh Classic II with Glider (this game's name was extremly hard to find), a tetris clone, a golf game and others as a 5-6 year old kid. I have lots of great memories about it (also it was in about 2003)
today we still use command line in linux and even online with building a web site and such.
the early all in one macs had a flaw where the analog board power supplies would fail and would need to be replaced.
There's something so soothing with watching these old videos. Great hipster joke as well 🤣
If you go to the wayback machine you can see the root URL from the end of the video as it looked in Feb 2011 (the closest date I could find to when this video was published).
I thought it would be is family's site - like his last name is Basinger, and LGR was his personal site on that domain. Instead its just a few links to some of his stuff.
like the camera quality in the intro
@phreakindee I've been reading "West of Eden" which was published in 1989 and chronicles the inner workings of Apple up to that point. I was in elementary school at that time in history so the only computer mentioned in the book that I've actually used is the Apple II. Videos like yours help me get a visual on the other computers written about in the book. So thanks again.
7:29
Walk like an egyptian...
Did you ever buy that bicycle??
(Turns into typical mac user) - Curse you Steve Jobbs!
I like this system, in some respects it was very impressive for its time, great review as well, it's always cool to wake up and see a new vid from you in my subscriptions box.
Ahh, Crystal Quest, so many hours of joy, the later versions have a rather …”unique” sound when you exit the gate at the end of each level… ;)
Thanks for the memory!
This was the first video I watched on this channel.
I remember the first proper computer in our house was a mac classic. We didn't own it (mum had borrowed it from work) but it looked almost identical. It wasn't the same model though, because I don't recall needing to do constant disk swaps, and in fact, I'm fairly sure it had a hard drive, and that I hardly ever put a disk in the thing. Not too much after that, we ended up with a 286 instead, which we actually did own. Also some atari 800's...
KuraIthys the Classic could have a hard disk, plus it had a 1.44MB floppy drive rather than a 400k drive that the original Macintosh came with
I just found your channel, and your content is great! I'm gonna be subscribed until the end of time itself :)
$50 for a Mac 128K. Those days are long gone.
The C64 had GEOS, which worked pretty well.
The real machine that blew the Mac out of the water was the Amiga, it had full cooperative multitasking before the Mac did.
despite the small screen, i had typesetting coworkers who actually used Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Pagemaker on a Mac Plus. I did the same on an SE/30 for a magazine. Large screens were rare in those days and we just got used to it.
i used that computer in high school. they replace all of them in the computer lab with the new i mac when it came out. i remember i use to play the first Sim City on that one when i was board. and loading the 2 floppy drives. Now students carry a USB flash drive.
Wow! I owned an SE30 way back when. Can't believe how far along with come. Thanks for sharing.
Loved my first Macintosh and now have a Quadra 605 which is my vintage Mac but still looking to collect more.
lmao that MS-DOS shirt is bodacious and gnarly at the same time!
Wow I just noticed that you have Global Communication as the music bed for this video. Great taste in music!
I re watched this video after possibly a decade. Still relevant.
Those prices make me so jealous!! That setup would probably go for triple the price at least now a days
im sure gta v can play on this just fine
Nah, that game is crappy
@Michał Woszczyło I like these kind of simple jokes
@@MetalSonicodraco7342 lol
You did quite nicely on this one Clint with what the prices are like now. Still I know as a fellow lover of old machines you likely never would. That SCSI upgrade card is likely worth a small fortune all on its own. I totally want that for mine.
Great coverage and very to-the-point. My only problem was(okay, is, I still have one) the disk swapping. Mine is unexpanded, no SCSI interface... yet!
Did you end up getting a SCSI interface?
@@walktroughman1952 No, never did get that SCSI interface. I have another of these machines but no real plans to upgrade it yet, this one needs to be troubleshot and I need a keyboard for it. 11 years! Yeah it has been a while.
Your videos today have far bigger production value but this intro theme is so frakin awesome and nostalgic :-D
I played so many shareware games on a MacPlus, you'd be surprised how late you could still dial into AOL on that thing. I'd love to see more B&W Mac game reviews.
They are crazy expensive now. I bought mine 512k for 20 euro. It came with all accessories and 5 disks like the system is and macinotsh write, but it hasn’t run in over 25 years and it probably never will.still think it’s cool as furniture.
I bought a Mac Plus about 1988 and had carrying bag for it. Had it stored in a closet since about 1990. A few months ago I got it out of the closet plugged in the external floppy drive and power cord and powered it up and... it booted up. After a few hours of fooling with it I put it back in the closet. If I'm around 20 years from now I might take it out again.
why did this get recommended to me
after A WHOLE DECADE
The only thing I remember from having a couple of these in the classroom in elementary school was playing an air hockey game.
Your shirt at the end reminds us all that your speaking from a DOS fan boy's point of view! :D
Looks like that Mac is packin the 68000 up in here! BLAST PROCESSING SON!
don't mind me, just watching old LGR
Woah, 7 years almost :)